Society
At last, a "not guilty" verdic
Published 07 June 2004
Observations on spies
Five years ago, the distinguished Oxford physicist and Manhattan Project veteran Sir Rudolf Peierls was accused, along with his wife Genia, of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1940s. According to the Spectator in 1999, taking its lead from a book by the spy writer Nigel West, they were "the best candidates to be the British Rosenbergs".
But was the charge true? Their daughter, Jo Hookway, wrote to the press pointing out that the evidence against her parents was speculative and flawed, and that some of her father's most illustrious associates, including the Nobel prize-winner Hans Bethe, firmly rejected the idea that they could have been spies.
However, not only is a lie halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on, but a charge of espionage against a former knight of the realm is better news than a reasoned denial. And with the Peierlses both dead - Sir Rudolf died in 1995 - a libel writ was impossible.
Hookway, a former IT consultant living in Yorkshire, was left angry and frustrated. It is always hard, she says, to prove a negative, and all the more so in the world of espionage, where truths are elusive and dishonesty the norm. Worse, she began to doubt her own parents. "The absolute certainty of the accusers that my father was a spy inevitably gave me moments where I questioned my own (and many other people's) judgement of my father as an extraordinarily honourable man," she says.
Such doubts have now been swept away. Unremarked at first among MI5 records released at the Public Record Office last month was a file on Sir Rudolf compiled in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It reaches an unusually categorical verdict.
The Peierlses were close friends of the atom scientist Klaus Fuchs, who definitely was a Soviet spy and was jailed as such in 1950. Because of the association, MI5 kept the family under surveillance for several years, monitoring their movements, intercepting mail and tapping telephone calls.
The result of all this prying and scrutiny, it turns out, was zero. Nothing suspicious ever turned up and the final summary, written in 1953, reads: "In our view there is no substantial doubt about the loyal- ty of Professor Peierls." Better still, perhaps, an earlier note by an official called C S Weldsmith declares: "I have read Peierls's file and it seems to me to show that not only have we nothing against him but that he is a man of very good sense."
Hookway is delighted but accepts that, even with such clear and rare evidence of innocence, some mud will continue to stick. "This proof that he was not a spy," she says, "is not going to be as newsworthy as the speculation that he was one."
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